What's a Cupcake?
by GetJinxt
Summary: So I had a cute description about the lowly street urchin turned champion and her path to glory here, but then the story completely changed direction. Basically, Vi is really, really messed up and desperately needs help. Lots of gore and probably lemon later.
1. Chapter 1

"Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck."

The pink-haired girl kept digging in the huge pile of rubble. Despite her hands already beginning to bruise and bleed, she continued to pull her fingers through the debris. After all, wasn't a quitter. That is, until she noticed the shiny, brand-spankin' new mining robot reduced to scraps by the collapse.

Pulling out her trusty hextech arcano-wrench, she got straight to work on the first idea to pop into her head: if her bare hands weren't strong enough to get them out of this mess, then a pair of hextech gauntlets might be. After a final adjustment and a steadying pull of air, she gently pushed her macerated hands into place and felt the gauntlets activate.

Her original idea had been to shift enough loose stone to exit through the elevator shaft before they all died of oxygen deprivation; however, it soon became clear that the gauntlets didn't have the fine motor control requisite to pick out pieces of rubble.

"If only these goddamn fingers were a little daintier," she cursed, as she punched the wall in frustration.

Spider cracks ran out from the impact site of her fist as a loud crack echoed through the mine shaft, stirring the miners that had given up hope into a frenzy. Like wild dogs, they foamed at the mouth and knocked each other aside as they screamed advice and adulation while she repeatedly punched the spot. The ever-widening hole became a tunnel to safety in no time.

As the miners began to attempt to pile in, the foreman stopped them all with a nod. "Say, girl, weren't you with the gang at the start? You should make a run for it before we all get out. It's the least we can do after you risked your life to save ours. What's your name, anyway?"

The girl vaulted into the tunnel without a glance back, but yelled back at the burly, moustachioed man:

"The name's Vi, it stands for VICE."

With a final loud smash, her gauntleted fist crashed through to a moonlit night, leading the way to freedom.


	2. Chapter 2

"Hey, wait up," I shouted to the younger girl speeding ahead.

"How's she so quick?" I muttered to myself as she whipped around the next corner.

With the sound of her hysterical laughter taunting me, I put on an extra burst of speed and nearly crashed into her as she paused for breath. The second she realized that I had caught her, she burst into giggles again, twisted out of my grip, and jumped two-at-a-time down the staircase to the underground.

"_Oh god, not again."_

Suddenly, a very muscular, tattooed arm snaked out from an alcove in the dirty brick wall and grabbed her, quickly dragging her into the darkness. Her laughter turned to screams, abruptly cutting off as the burly stranger grabbed her throat. The last thing I saw before she was completely obscured by the darkness were her glowing pinkish eyes slowly closing.

As I opened my mouth to scream for help, I woke up.

The second she gained consciousness, Vi knew that something was wrong. Her tiny room, usually dim at all hours, was bright as day and she could sense the presence of someone silently watching. She turned over, still feigning sleep, and stuck her hands into the improved gauntlets that she had taken to hiding under the sheets while she slept. As soon as she heard them power up, Vi jumped out of the bed and assumed a ready stance.

There, in her cramped single room, stood the five members of her former gang. Sitting on her table, standing over her bed, sitting on the floor; regardless of where they were, all seven sets of eyes followed her. She didn't like that she couldn't look into all of them at once.

"So, I see you ain't had trouble sleepin', eh, Vi? Not after dippin' out on yer brothers-in-arms?" grunted a one-eyed giant with knife scars covering his forearms.

Vi kept eye contact with him as she slowly turned her head to the side, then spat. "I don't owe you nothin', Jimmy. You scumballs haven't done me any favors, neither, leaving me to die in that tunnel."

As Vi finished her brash announcement, Jimmy grinned and cracked his knuckles. "I can't say I weren't hopin' for this, girl. You been too smart for your pants way too long," he growled as he began to advance on her. Just as a fight seemed inevitable, a clear, cold voice cut through the tension, quick as a bullet.

"Cut the shit, we have business to do," stated a tall, muscular man with one eye and a scar ripping down his face from the empty socket. "So you seem to have gone back on our previous arrangement, Six. I thought you were smarter than that," he murmured softly, almost sensually, as he gently curled a stray piece of hair behind her ear. Suddenly, his mouth shifted from a casual grin to a straight line of tension. "Why would you do that to me, Six?"

Vi shook her hair back out of place and snorted impatiently. "I don't have time for this shit. Let's just fight already, yeah?" she said as she charged up a Vaultbreaker and rammed straight into Jimmy's chest. When she pulled her gauntlet out of his quivering corpse, there was a giant, fist-sized hole straight through his chest, leaking smoke. A faint red mist began to settle along the floor.

With that, the rest of the gang charged, attempting to force her to the ground and overpower her. After a few minutes of prolonged struggle, she lay on her dirty floor, completely worn out and struggling for breath through two broken ribs and a throat bruised from multiple people attempting to asphyxiate her. Even though she managed to take out one more guy, who was lying face down in a pool of blood, five was too much for one girl to handle. Once she was finally subdued by his remaining lackeys, the boss approached her.

"Now that I've got you where I want you, I have a little secret to tell you," he murmured sweetly. "Remember that girl you told me about? Your little friend from the streets?-"

"Don't you DARE talk to me about her," Vi raged at him. "You know you can't do that, C." Vi struggled uselessly against her captors, to no avail.

"Well, she's still alive," he stated very simply. A grin curled his face into an amalgamation of evil and mirth. "I just figured I'd let you know before I take the blood price out out of your skin and use the rest of it as a rug."

My world suddenly became tinged with blue. The burly men restraining me suddenly seemed like rag dolls as I threw them off of me effortlessly. I began to laugh, truly laugh, with wild abandon. I hadn't felt this good since she… well, for a very long time. As I noted the two men I had just smashed into the walls were slumped over, unmoving, that laughter began to take on a hysterical edge. My vision suddenly blotted out as everything became a stream of solid blue; I stopped laughing and slowly advanced on C with an insanely wide, manic grin.


	3. Chapter 3

"Oh god, not again."

Suddenly, a very muscular, tattooed arm snaked out from an alcove in the dirty brick wall and grabbed her arm, pulling on blue braids, quickly dragging her into the depths. Her laughter turned to screams, abruptly cutting off as the burly stranger grabbed her throat. The last thing I saw before she was completely obscured by the darkness were her glowing pinkish eyes slowly closing, and a glint of malicious joy in the man's single eye.

As he makes his escape into the sewers, the sound of his mocking laughter echoes through the confined space.

The really fucked up part is that I've been laughing with him the whole time.

...

Vi woke up on the cold ground of her apartment with a wide grin still plastered to her face; a grin that almost immediately disappeared upon realizing that she was lying on a floor drenched in blood. The bodies of her former gangmates littered the room like discarded soda cans.

As she struggled to her feet under the weight of her gauntlets, a wave of nausea smashed into her just like she had smashed into Jimmy. It took her a few minutes to stop spewing long enough to even begin to remember what had happened the previous night.

When she finally collected her thoughts, a fresh wave of panic and nausea hit her. She had killed just about everyone she had any ties to in a fit of homicidal rage during a complete break from reality. The memory of her own laughter echoed through her brain, making her fear for herself.

"Am I crazy? Like the kind of crazy you need to be locked up for? Hextech save me, I just literally punched a fuckin' guy's head off," she soliloquized. "To be fair, they all had it coming. Especially C." With a gasp, she recalled the revelation that her sister was possibly still alive.

Without a backward glance, she grabbed her pack and tore out of her ruined building without even sloughing off some of the blood that felt like it was seeping beneath her skin.

...

The youngest Sheriff that Piltover had ever had was having a hard time keeping her lunch down in front of her lieutenants. Never before had a set of murders like this occurred under her jurisdiction. The dramatic nature of the multiple homicide only added to her mixture of terror and disgust.

The entire room had been flooded with several inches of deep red blood from six corpses that looked as though a giant had crumpled them up and thrown them away.

Beneath her horror, an undercurrent of excitement gave her hands tremors. Finally, a crime beyond the mindless theft and smuggling endemic to Piltover, worthy of the full power of her investigative genius.

"Finally."


	4. Chapter 4

"I don't know what my name is. I never really had one, I guess. At least, that I can remember." The speaker, a blue-haired girl with braids past her waist, attempted conversation with a man deep into his cups. As he glared at her blearily, she slowly tapered off and slipped him a card under the table.

A grin cracked his grimy face in half as his bloodshot eyes greedily ate away at her. His scraggly beard twitched slightly as his gaze turned predatory. He laid down a twenty to pay his tab and staggered to an upright position, then grabbed her arm and dragged her outside toward the alley behind the bar. The smell of cheap perfume and the rotting, unmarked bundles strewn everywhere engulfed them both as he threw her against a wall.

Watching him chortle as he fiddled with his belt, the girl plastered a wide grin onto her face and allowed herself to drift away.

"Just call me Jinx."

...

The first time that Caitlyn had killed something, it seemed inconsequential to her. Her parents had never had much time for her, but on her sixth birthday they bought her a pet: the fluffiest bunny rabbit you've ever seen. She had played with the ball of fur for hours, making up games and contests for him to excel in. If he didn't excel, she simply made him do it again until he was the most agile, reactive bunny around. Until one day, he simply could not follow her orders.

She had been trying to teach him to respond to verbal cues and even communicate with her. It had taken her hours to create an elaborate language of noises, gestures, and patterns of movement, but the helpless creature couldn't seem to understand her at all.

After a few days of failed attempts, I simply... flew into a rage.

My cheeks, red with frustration, drained of color and it seemed like the air grew colder. I actually **was** colder. I could feel the energy of the room boring into me, compressing me like one of those machines that smashes old cars into unrecognizable little boxes of metal. Everything seemed to slow down as I focused in on my pathetic, quivering target.

I slowly picked my pet up and looked into its eyes. And then I tightened my tiny hands around his neck and shook him like a ragdoll. A slight smile played at my lips as his squealing ceased and he went limp.

Curiously, I peered into his face and saw nothing; the only thing left of his failure was a beaten up shell. My hands shook with the thrill of power and my heart pounded with the first true excitement I had ever felt.

...

After the confrontation with her gang, Vi had decided to go underground. Literally into the sewers. She wanted to make a statement.

She plopped down into the murky, brownish water with the grace of a dancing bear. It was only up to her knees, but the splash from her descent drenched her. Wrinkling her nose, she grit her teeth and just kept moving until she found a newer-looking pipe with copper inlays turning north on a slightly raised platform.

She knew that the richer denizens of Piltover lived in the northern part of town, but hadn't realized that it would be so damn easy to find her way.

"They seriously need a fancy pipe to carry their shit down to the old town?" she muttered to herself, smirking.

She swung herself up and started trudging through the markedly lower water level. Her smirk only continued to widen as she walked toward the most classy part of town.

...

Even though I'm grinning like an idiot, I hate this. I absolutely hate this. I hate this with every part of myself, even the parts that aren't all mine. On some fundamental level, I know that I'm completely fucking crazy to even be able to cope with this level of inhumanity, but for some reason I don't care. I just put a smile on. Customer service, with a smile!

I just lay here while this disgusting waste of flesh and bone grunts and struggles to finish himself off. God, he can barely even keep it up long enough to get it in. How do these men survive in a place like Zaun? How do they have money to spare for this kind of thing? What kind of person even wants to do this sort of thing?

As the pace of his panting picks up, at least I know it'll be over soon. For now. Then I'll go find some new loser and start all over again. It's such a vicious cycle, but I don't see how I can ever be free of it. The first thing they did when I got shipped to this hellhole was thrust a tracker into my arm. It's in there, embedded in my muscle and sinew. I can feel it inside of me, ticking, ticking, ticking, holding me down. I can feel it clawing my sides and breathing heavily on the back of my neck.

This nightmare will never be over. I have no hope of escape, at least not if I plan on staying alive. To be honest, at this point it's hard to choose between life and death. The only thing really keeping me around is the spectre that haunts me, whispering encouraging words and betraying me in the same breath. In fact, she's talking to me right now. I suddenly decide to take her advice.

As the drunkard gasps and clenches for a final time, I wait a second before getting off the grungy pavement. I pull out the tiny zapping pistol that I carry, just in case, and flick the power up to lethal. It's easy as can be to aim between his shoulderblades and fire a single shot.

He's dead before he knows what hit him.

I scramble to grab his dirty wad of money and run. Killing brings me no joy, but maybe this will be a step toward something. I made a decision about my life on my own behalf - that's a step forward from here, for sure.

Maybe I can end the cycle on my own.

A/N: Hello friends. I've never really written an author's note before, so here goes. I'm sorry that I'm taking literal ages to get these chapters out, but this is actually the first story I've ever written so I'm trying to make it really good. I would really appreciate it if you would take the time to leave a review so that I can improve as I go. The lack of feedback thus far is slightly discouraging, but I do plan on writing this story to its completion. Just, some love/criticism would be great! Thanks, readers. 3


End file.
